Thomas Edison State College's long-time president on the importance of education in the US

George Pruitt has long believed a good education for all is crucial for the United States to function well as a nation.

From his days as a student at Illinois State University, where he protested the lack of minority students and faculty, to his current role as president of Thomas Edison State College in Trenton, Pruitt has pushed to see that education is available to everyone.

“Why everyone? Because in our country, people are citizens, and the citizens own the country rather than being subjects of the government or monarchy,” Pruitt said. “Our government was created to serve the citizens, not vice versa.”

Pruitt, who has been at the helm of Thomas Edison State College for 31 years, said he draws much of his inspiration about education from Thomas Jefferson, who has been heralded as the father of public education.

“Thomas Jefferson established our country as one which believed in and established a universal educational system in order to educate all of our citizens, not just the elite,” Pruitt said. “Thomas Jefferson understood that it is a great responsibility to be a citizen, and if this experiment is going to work, the public must be educated and sophisticated enough to carry out the responsibilities of a citizen.”

At Thomas Edison, which caters exclusively to adult students, he carries out these ideals by providing choices that meet the specific needs of the student body.

For example, students can earn credits for experiential education, where they demonstrate through a portfolio of work and tests that they have mastered a topic through real-life work experience. Students can then determine where and how they want to learn, he said.

At the younger ages, Pruitt said the focus on learning should be on reading, writing, thinking and analyzing. The discussions of voucher systems and charter schools simply distract from where the real focus should be, Pruitt said, on what he said are very critical skills.

“The nature of education is not just learning skills, content, what you know and what you can do,” Pruitt said. “It’s also learning what your obligations are as a citizen. You have to understand that you are part of a community. Your future and destiny of yourself and your family are tied to the success of the community, not just your own individual attainment.”

Pruitt has long put those words into action.

Born in Mississippi and raised in Chicago, he was involved in student protests over the status of minorities and the lack of access granted to them despite segregation having been ruled illegal. Pruitt began his college career at the University of Illinois and he earned a bachelor’s degree in biology and chemistry from Illinois State in 1968. Before graduating, he wrote a grant proposal for a program to help address the access issue, and then earned his master’s degree in guidance and counseling while running the program at Illinois State.

“I saw education as absolutely essential to the personal and spiritual liberation of individuals, so I committed myself to that,” Pruitt said. “People are the architects of their own lives, or at least they should be. There’s fate, there’s luck, and there’s faith, but in the end, your life is the function of the choices you make. But, you only have a choice if you perceive you have a choice and you understand what your options are. People need to be empowered to be the custodians of their own future.”

During the turbulent period of the late 1960s and early ’70s, he served as dean of students at Towson University, and then vice president at Morgan State University for 3½ years before moving to the vice president’s position at Tennessee State University.

He came to Thomas Edison as executive vice president for the Council for Adult Education and Experiential Learning, and was promoted to president two years later.

In addition, Pruitt has served in an advisory capacity to four secretaries of education under three presidents, and has served on numerous education councils, including the American Council on Education, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, the New Jersey Association of State Colleges and Universities, and the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity. Pruitt currently is vice chairman of the National Commission on Higher Education Attainment.

Pruitt said he chose the field of education because he felt there was no career more important.

But he worries about the quality of the education students are receiving today and whether it is preparing them for the future.

“The future of this country was built on working-class people being educated and empowered to create structures and institutions that generate wealth to take care of our citizens. Education is the vehicle we have for developing human capital,” Pruitt said.

“Public education in my opinion has failed miserably. We don’t want to talk about it because if we understand the fact of the failure, then we have to do something about it. And the things that need to be done to fix it, we don’t want to do because they’re difficult.

“We are at a place now in our culture and society where we don’t like to do difficult things anymore. We don’t like to talk about shared sacrifice; we don’t like to talk about accountability in the right way. We don’t need to point fingers and blame people or talk politics — we need to focus on fixing the problems. It’s our obligation to ourselves, our family, and our nation to fix the problems with our educational system,” he said.

“The entire existence of this country and its future depends on the quality of our people, and the only way we have to invest in the quality of our people is through education. And we can’t afford to screw that up,” Pruitt said.

“This country is 250 years old. It’s an experiment, and the jury is still out. In the lifespan of nations, we are an infant. We’ve had a fortunate childhood, but we are still in infancy. For this to work, education is the key.”